One of the wonderful rituals of spring when I was a boy was receiving a new baseball for the upcoming summer. It was sooo white and pristine; not a stitch was broken and the name was still fresh and unsmudged. Hopefully, the ball read "Rawlings" or "Wilson" or some other such brand that was wound tightly and had a cork center. Sometimes our parents would buy a ball that read "Cheap" (not really, but it may as well have) and it was filled with sawdust. After one or two vigorous days of playing with it, the sawdust usually shifted and the ball was lopsided.
The trick, of course, was not to lose that baseball all summer. If it landed in the neighbor's hedge, the hedge had to be searched until the ball was found and scratches be damned. If the dog scooped it up, then you had to chase the dog and hopefully, catch him before he slobbered on it so badly that it became water-logged.
If you were lucky, you kept that ball all summer, by the end of which, the ball was about as brown as the leaves were turning.
All of which brings me to this summer. Al and I began our "old-timers'" season with 18 balls. We played yesterday again--catch, two rounds of batting practice, some infield--and it appears that we will finish the season with 40. Forty balls! Had we been given 40 baseballs all at one time when we were kids, our eyes would have rolled back in our heads and we would have fainted.
How did our ball supply increase instead of decrease? For one thing, we still have that mentality that we must hunt down every ball as though it were the only one we owned. For another, the younger generation is used to a largesse of baseballs and so they don't chase down batting practice home runs and they leave them lying about in bullpens and dugouts. Al and I simply make it a point to scour a certain ballpark that we visit often and turn the young guys' carelessness into the old guys' gain. I won't reveal where this ballpark is, but let's just say many of our new-found baseballs read "Valley League."
You might want to add that we don't hit'em as far anymore and hence they are easier to find.
Posted by: al Smith | November 29, 2010 at 10:02 AM